Book Review: Clemente

Thoughts on Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero by David Maraniss

Roberto Clemente’s life and career is an epic tale. Puerto Rican Clemente played Major League baseball for the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates in record-breaking home runs, hits, games, championships and World Series. Clemente’s life, which ended on New Year’s Eve in a 1972 plane crash that shocked the nation, is simply larger than life. David Maraniss, a journalist for the Washington Post who covered Bill Clinton and the Virginia Tech mass murder, as well as Vince Lombardi in a biography, indulged his obsession with Roberto Clemente. This highly detailed 2007 biography, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, is the result.

Maraniss admires Clemente for what he explicitly regards as Clemente’s self-sacrifice. In this sense, the author is certainly part of sports journalism’s and Washington, DC’s status quo; he never wavers or questions altruism as the highest morality—accordingly, Maraniss makes bad judgments and wrong conclusions—and he’s candid about his moral premise. Almost every act of Clemente’s curiosity, decency and benevolence is taken as an act of altruism or a “redistribution of wealth”. From Clemente’s violent childhood to Clemente’s violent death, with 18 seasons of baseball in between, Maraniss reports and chronicles the facts of his legendary life.

Readers learn that Pirates’ boss Branch Rickey, who’d hired Jackie Robinson at the Brooklyn Dodgers and was initially unimpressed by Clemente, observed that:

[Clemente’s] form at the plate is perfect. The bat is out and back and in good position to give him power. There is not the slightest hitch or movement in his hands or arms and the big end of the bat is completely quiet when the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. His sweep is level—very level. His stride is short and his stance is good to start with and he finishes good with his body. I know of no reason why he should not become a very fine hitter. I would not class him, however, as even a prospective homerun hitter.”

Branch Rickey was ultimately proven right about most of his early analysis. And, when the topic is baseball qua baseball, Maraniss provides interesting biography of a top-ranked ballplayer, who, with Lou Gehrig, was posthumously admitted into baseball’s hall of fame under exceptional conditions. Clemente, he writes, sourcing those who know, worked at fielding, studying balls hit into the right field fence at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field before games, combining “studiousness with fearlessness.”

Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh recounted for most of his career that Clemente made the best catch he ever saw in a home game against the San Francisco Giants. “In the seventh-inning, Willie Mays had a line shot to the right field corner that Clemente, running full speed, caught just as he was crashing into a brick abutment on the unpadded wall. He bruised his knee and cut his chin, needing six stitches but held onto the ball and save[d] the game...” The year was 1959. 

Clemente could hit, too, eventually reaching the 3,000 hit milestone in his final game, and his extremely heavy Louisville Slugger bat was a treasured instrument. To Clemente, who would scour Puerto Rico’s beaches during the off-season hunting for driftwood to carve into lamps and other furniture, the bat’s composition was crucial. He studied “the hardness and grains of different woods,” Maraniss reports, adding that one source said that Clemente “wanted the widest grains...and he knew the wide grains came in the summer growth[;] he was that precise.”

Clemente, according to another source, was as exact about his body, which he conditioned to be all “bone and sinew with long arms that looked longer still because of the Pirates’ sleeveless shirts.” His signature became what the same source dubbed “the thrill of the throw—with a motion faster than any [he] had ever seen ‘and overhand, with an exaggerated follow-through, so that when he wound up…he looked like a dervish expelling a cannonball.’” When he hit the ball with his custom-made bat, the energy could be fierce, too. Once, when Roberto Clemente hit to the center field, the ball “ripped skin from [Don] Drysdale’s ear…Drysdale then ‘had the sensation of a bug crawling on his neck; he reached and flicked at it. Leaning down for the resin bag, he noticed a runny substance on his finger, and still feeling the irritation, he reached up and discovered his ear was bleeding. The ball had actually taken the skin off the top of his ear on its way out to centerfield.”

Maraniss notes that Roy McHugh later remembered Clemente as sublime: “In repose, there was a grace and beauty to Clemente. ‘Compact, flawlessly sculpted, with chiseled ebony features and an air of unshakable dignity...He carried himself—everybody noticed this—like royalty.’ At times, as Clemente posed on second after a double, McHugh thought of Michelangelo’s statue of David—David wearing a baseball uniform.” 

Clemente knew he was dynamic. To the author’s credit, and Maraniss acknowledges this more than once, he reports that self-confident Clemente refused to be humble, though Maraniss never explicitly admits to this. As Roberto Clemente, in his own broken English, is quoted in Pittsburgh’s black newspaper, the Courier: “I like all the people, both colored and the white; and since I am colored myself in the skin, I would be [silly to] hate myself...I like myself...[I know] I hit real good.’” 

Clemente’s self-esteem dogged his reputation throughout his career, as teammates and competing players saw him as prickly, arrogant and overly sensitive. Maraniss points out that another source defends Clemente’s sensitivity as a “huge sense of self-worth...that he [knew he] was as good as anyone who ever lived. That [he thought] people should recognize that he was a special person. He didn’t lord it over anybody, he just believed it.” 

Clemente affords a portrait of Roberto Clemente as the philosopher athlete—in the highest, almost Greek sense of the term—the physical-intellectual-spiritual athletic masculine ideal. According to Maraniss, as Clemente’s wife, Vera, once described her husband’s domestic game day routine: “He closed the shades, the drapes, and put plastic over the drapes to make them darker. He tried to sleep. He would stay there until he was ready to go to the game. I used to take him, and on the way from the apartment to the stadium he didn’t talk much. I believe he was thinking, tonight so-and-so will be the pitcher, and how Pittsburgh could win. He was always thinking.”

Details are often enticing. Clemente was raised by an older father who managed sugarcane field workers on an island with export restrictions and high taxes, where the government paid property owners not to grow sugarcane. After running across a highway, Clemente pulled a stranger out of a burning car when he was 12. When he was a child, Clemente’s sister died with burns covering 90 percent of her body after “a can of gasoline spilled.” Clemente was raised by a religious mother to believe that “life is nothing...[l]ife is fleeting...[and o]nly God makes man happy.” Somehow, Roberto Clemente became an imaginative, artistic boy who was a hero worshipper. Besides using rolled-up socks as baseballs in games he often played alone, Clemente taught himself to become a carpenter, a musician, a ham radio operator and a javelin thrower. And, “at age 38, Clemente still had ‘muscled shoulders rippling down to a narrow waist, 30 inches, the same measurements he had as a teenager.” 

Citing a photographer, Maraniss writes that his “biceps and calves had sinewy muscularity yet he was not musclebound. ‘He was a sculpture. He could’ve posed for Greek statues. What you saw with him was archaeology. He was a perfect model. Not an ounce of extra fat. All the right muscle. A perfect figure for a man of any age.’” Yet he was unpretentious. When Clemente could afford to own a home, Maraniss writes, he paid $65,000 for a house on property in his Puerto Rican hometown with a “bridged front walkway leading from the street over shallow moatlike ponds to the front door, [with] wide spaces for plants everywhere, the panoramic view down the hill and off towards San Juan and the Atlantic [Ocean]...[where] the neighbors were doctors and engineers…” Inside the house, Clemente added “a Hammond organ and taught himself how to play it; he did not read music, but he could listen to a tune on the radio and hammer out the melody within five minutes.”

David Maraniss traveled to Pittsburgh and Puerto Rico and spoke with dozens of Clemente’s fans, teammates, reporters, friends and relatives. Throughout Clemente, one gets a sense of him as the introverted athlete of ability. As someone who knew him observes: “He had a restless intelligence and was always thinking about life. He had an answer for everything, his own blend of logic and superstition.”

The biography’s best when Maraniss writes about Roberto Clemente making his own character. A favorite Clemente phrase as a boy “was ‘momentito, momentito’ which he apparently muttered so often that his nickname was Momen—because he said “momentito” whenever he was interrupted or asked to do something. “From a young age, Roberto had his own way of doing things,” Maraniss writes. “He was pensive, intelligent and could not be rushed. He wanted to know how and why.”

If only David Maraniss had wanted to know why. There are numerous contradictions—almost every time Maraniss invokes Clemente’s skin color or ethnicity, a contradiction comes a few sentences, pages or paragraphs later—and the altruist-collectivist bent detracts, though it would probably interfere more in today’s stifling culture. At least the reporting, which appears to be solid, usually contains deeper truth. As Clemente, who faced injustice, once said: “I am from Puerto Rico, but I am also an American citizen. We have an opportunity to travel. I just came from South America. I’ve been to Europe...[and] I can tell you one thing, I won’t trade this country for no one country. We, no matter what, we have the best country in the world and you can believe it.” 

Roberto Clemente died on New Year’s Eve when a plane he chartered from Puerto Rico to bring charity relief to Nicaraguan earthquake victims crashed on takeoff. This final descent has immortalized him in this self-sacrificing culture as an icon of selflessness. But the athlete quoted here casts some degree of doubt on altruism as his primary motivation. Maraniss notes that, during a televised pitch for charitable relief, “[e]very so often, Clemente grabbed the microphone and instructed people on how to make donations. ‘Don’t give money that you cannot afford,’ Clemente said.” 

Margin notes in Clemente contain one persistent word followed by a single punctuation mark: why? Maraniss, who accounts for Clemente’s two World Series and seasons of leadership and athleticism, never delves deep into Roberto Clemente as a friend, father, husband, son, brother or Pittsburgh Pirate. Regarding Clemente’s wedding to Vera (who recently died in Puerto Rico), he names Clemente’s friend Victor as best man. Why did he choose Victor—why did he teach himself to play the organ—why did he admire Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Maraniss writes Clemente met on several occasions, including during an extended, private visit to Clemente’s ranch? 

During Roberto Clemente’s lifetime, there are streaks of Puerto Rican nationalism imposed on him, and various dark or malevolent shades of mysticism, as well as hints of mental illness, torment or despair. Maraniss never fully addresses, let alone resolves or puts to rest, these potential points. One wonders whether Clemente was bipolar, autistic or neurotic. “[Clemente] was an insomniac and rarely slept,” Maraniss writes. Why? Clemente’s hobbies included ham radio. Why—what precipitated his interest? When last chapters lead up to the Nicaragua earthquake that would consume and, ultimately, doom, the star athlete, Maraniss notes that “[b]y then, Clemente had developed a direct ham radio connection to a hospital in Masaya, 13 miles from Managua and was told how much they needed medicines and x-ray equipment” and that “Clemente decided to lease a plane to get supplies to Nicaragua faster.”

Clearly, he was concerned about reports of food and medicine being seized by Nicaragua’s dictatorship but why the urgency to fly on New Year’s Eve? Maraniss documents corruption within Puerto Rico, San Juan International Airport and the FAA about oversight of the overweighted aircraft and negligent flight crew yet he fails to address whether an investigation was launched—even after Roberto Clemente’s plane crashed into the sea, killing everyone on board. Disclosing that Clemente handed a slip of paper on which he had written his home phone number, asking a mechanic to call his house and tell Vera when and if the plane left for Nicaragua, Maraniss implies that Clemente, who’d been repeatedly forewarned about the plane’s poor condition, all but ceded to his mother’s gloomy determinism. As the mechanic stood on the ladder, he writes in Clemente, he “caught a final glimpse of the scene inside: Arthur Rivera sat in the right cockpit seat and Jerry Hill was in the captain’s seat. Clemente was sitting on the lower bunk in the cabin, forward of the cargo.”

The Pittsburgh Pirate, Maraniss admits, who had missed his wedding anniversary and Thanksgiving with his three sons and wife—to lead amateur baseball in Nicaragua—“kept saying that he hated to be separated from his family and...kept leaving.” Maraniss never explains why. At one point, when a businessman expresses doubt about the flight’s safety, “Roberto said, “don’t worry. They know what they’re doing...Clemente chose not to worry about the [weight on the visibly low] tires.”

Was Clemente reckless? If so—why? Maraniss doesn’t examine, let alone elucidate, these issues. Other flaws include Maraniss showing off, including an overly indulgent Pirates history, with no relevance to the topic. Still, the reader learns that there’s depth to Roberto Clemente more than the predominant notion that “the great one” sacrificed himself for the sake of others. “You know,” Clemente once told a youngster, “everybody thinks it’s easy to go out there and hit and run. But you have to be in good physical condition, because you have to play this game well, especially if you love this game. And if you want to do what you love most in life, you have to be prepared for it.”

At another point, he disdains going to parties: “I don’t like those kinds of things,” Clemente said. “There is not fun for me. Last one I went to all I did was stand in a corner.” Clemente loved Pittsburghers, though. “The fans of Pittsburgh, he said, made everything worthwhile. They were the reason he was glad the Pirates won the World Series. They were the best fans in the world.”

As Maraniss writes:

Clemente’s first friend in Pittsburgh was Phil Dorsey, who worked at the post office and had served in an army reserve unit...Soon they developed a routine, with Dorsey, when he was off work, driving the carless Clemente to and from games and out to eat. The life of a ballplayer comes with oceans of free time, and Dorsey helped Clemente fill them. They played pool and penny-ante poker and ate Chinese food and went to the movies. Clemente loved westerns, and would memorize lines from them as a way to learn more English. (Years later, in the clubhouse several hours before a game, a teammate saw Clemente standing in front of a mirror with a young [latino] player, helping the newcomer with English by having him repeat a phrase from The Lone Ranger: “you go into town...I’ll meet you at the canyon.”

The Roberto “Clemente you saw in [the 1971 World Series] was the Clemente who played every day; how he never got enough endorsement offers because he was black and Puerto Rican; and how he is really a happy person, not some sourpuss, but [he] only smiles when the occasion calls for smiling”, someone recalls. Clemente from the 1971 World Series evokes for someone else a panther, “rounding second and sliding into third, so graceful and strong, such spectacular passion. What a good man.”

Clemente yields evidence, if not through an integrated narrative, that the reader ought to hold this last claim as true. But Clemente by David Maraniss expressly offers cause to question sacrifice as the reason Roberto Clemente ought to be remembered as great.